Bitcoin Forum

More or less all of us aware that there are dead bitcoins (wrong transfers, forgotten private keys, etc), i read that there are almost 3m bitcoins dead and every year bitcoins are dying, so i think there will be a critic number of dead bitcoins, if we reach it, there must be a correction for the dead bitcoins, maybe the new fork will allow re-mining the lost bitcoins. But the problem is how can we say an acount is dead? We have to find an answer for this question.

It just means that your bitcoins are worth more than they otherwise would've been since fewer are in circulation.  This isn't a problem that needs a solution.  There is plenty of room to the right of the decimal to handle it and that can be increased if ever needed.  Just because coins haven't moved doesn't mean that someone doesn't have the key.  

Just remember that in a free world what someone else does with his bitcoins (money, life etc) really isn't your business and vice versa.

I agree that a lot of people lost access to their wallets or made an error which locked those coins forever, I however do not think it's much of an issue now as it was 6-12 years ago. People still make errors and use it the wrong way, but more people are getting sensitive to security especially as it's much more valuable now.

It would be difficult to decide on and probably, it would not become necessary to try and increase the supply, as I doubt we'll get to a critical supply level. But if a consensus is ever reached, it could be dependent on the number of years a wallet was inactive i.e, no sent or received transactions. A 30+ or 50+ years timeframe is possible.
I would like to know, if this was ever to happen and there was an error (the owner of the coins still had the private keys), could they be able to prove it and retrieve their coins and for this to happen would there need to get a central panel to decide on cases?

maybe we face with bitcoin and bitcoin classic forks, classic will use existing chain. But i think this is very hard issue and need to discussed.

I agree that is not our business to decide what is old or lost. So as the user cr1776 said

Just remember that in a free world what someone else does with his bitcoins (money, life etc) really isn't your business and vice versa.

There is approx 120 more years left for mining new coins which is more than enough. As others have said, 'lost' coins just make the ones left more valuable ergo, there is ZERO need to re-issue coins that are sitting in limbo.

First of all, this is what makes bitcoin decentralized: nobody controls. There is no guy to decide what coins are lost and which are not.

the rules are set: private key, block subsidy, mining reward, etc. Those rules cannot change. This is what gives value to bitcoin.

Second, you can't know for sure if a coin is lost/inaccessible or the owner is just holding.

Let's suppose that someone decided to do as you said, and successfully deleted those coins to be mined again. But what if someone decided that YOUR coins are lost, because you didn't move them for the last 5 years?

There is no way for this idea to work.

I'm okay with the coins remaining lost, just means less in circulation

Those are lost forever. Let them leave and stay at peace.
Maybe after not moving any single coin for a decade? but that still doesn't prove that those coins were lost forever. No need for forks, they're all just making those developers who want to fork rich. And even you'll make a fork, those lost coins won't be back from being lost forever.

Since bitcoin bullrun and reached ATH again, it was reported that many people lost their private bitcoin swallow keys. as recently experienced by a programmer who could not unlock his hard drive containing 7000 Bitcoin and is still unsolved. More and more people forget their wallet keys and some bitcoins left by their owners. We really can't know which address is dead and out of use. there is no right way to say their account is dead, except by reports by the users themselves or by others. Some people are even now starting to inherit other people to hold their addresses when they die so that addresses containing bitcoin are not left behind.

That questions of "what happens when all the bitcoins are lost?" and "what happens when all the bitcoins have been mined?" have been answered thousands of times. The answer is nothing. Nothing is broken. Nobody needs to do anything.

How do you figure out which UTXOs are simply unmoved because they are in cold storage versus them belonging to lost keys? That is just not possible due to how Bitcoin works.

Forks are just stupid. Community could use less forks imo.

This is commented many times in the past. It's not going to happen. You cannot tell what coins are 'lost' and what are just holding. That's the point of crypto - you are your bank. If you lose your coins, the only wrong-doing person is you.

i dont think need to be fork or something like that,  bitcoin fork it already happen many times tho. the lost bitcoin is awful but its already happen we can recover it, it is good fewer coin mean higher price right

How many times have I read this exact topic. And how many more times will I read it in the future.

This question has been answered again and again.

I'll throw in my 2 cents. Scarcity is good. We don't need lost or burnt bitcoins to be mined again. It's a slippery slope. If you're so fond of bringing back dead coins, why not create/print more out of thin air.

This isn't fiat. It's bitcoin.


There is a more mature discussion to be had, leaving ignorance behind. There is no critical amount of bitcoin that can be lost after all. Perhaps except for 100%.

The more mature discussion is about design.



When I die, if I haven't made arrangements for my bitcoin to move to somebody I see that as a donation to everyone here.

Dead. They are not dead bitcoins and bitcoin is not dead. You are using the inaccurate phrase. The correct phrase is lost bitcoin. They are lost bitcoin from people who create those wallets and sent bitcoins in those addresses. They lost private keys, then lost those bitcoins or they get health issues, accidents, no one knows what happened with them.

Why do we need to remine those lost bitcoin? It help bitcoin becomes more scarcity and the fact is life is oneway process and bitcoin network is irreversible, the same.

There are hundreds of forks from bitcoin but they are forked to steal your bitcoin. How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5221882.0)

First of all just because someone guessed that X number of coins are "lost" that doesn't mean their guess was correct, it is still a guess.
Secondly just because some coins haven't moved for Y number of days, that doesn't mean they are "lost" or as OP likes to call it "dead"!!!
And finally just because some coins are burnt (provably lost) that doesn't mean we have to create a fork to "un-burn" them and enter them into circulation. Satoshi discussed this once if I'm not mistaken, unless a ridiculous number of coins are provably burnt (something like 18 million BTC send to OP_RETURN for example) and the lack of circulating supply is felt, there is no reason for any kind of action.

I think that a Bitcoin wallet can be considered "dead",if there are no incoming or outdoing transactions from that wallet in a period of 10 years.We need to put a longer time frame,because there are many long term HODLers.10 years seems enough to me.Anyway,this is just a suggestion.I don't think that such fork will ever be created in the future.
I don't like the idea of "re-mining" all lost or dead coins,because it will increase the Bitcoin supply and some miners and developers might find a way to abuse the system.

Introducing arbitrary rules such as this will do more harm than good. 10 years is simply not enough time in the grand scheme of things. Try 100 years and even that will not be enough time. There are many long term holders who have unspent UTXOs from years ago, in form of cold storage and more notably in form of physical collectibles such as Casascius coins. I would not consider those "dead" Bitcoins.

See, if something like this were to happen, it would have to be introduced in one of the first versions of Bitcoin and not 12 years after Bitcoin's inception. You just can't introduce these arbitrary rules like these and expect people to take you seriously.

calm down you will get your funds back, after the support has finished checking your account. because there are several problems facing not only your account. I experienced it in 2020 when I forgot to turn off the VPN. regardless of your review, I recommend continuing to lobby support or do a comparative test.

Altcoins with their premined, minted coins or tokens have many burn events and they love to compromise their premined/ minted amount. They get rich from beginning (with premined, minted amount) and get richer with burn events. Events to burn are for altcoins, not for bitcoin. The event only causes unreal feelings on scarcity of those altcoins but it is feasible to use and make altcoin investors mad with their decisions.

I'm not suggesting that we burn bitcoin on purpose, I'm talking about the case where we can know without a shadow of a doubt that the coins are indeed burnt not just guess that certain amount of coins are burnt just because they haven't moved in some time like what OP suggested.
Besides what altcoins do is not even actually affecting the reality of their supply because they can also print as many as they want later on if the price pumped and stayed pumped.

cant believe that theres still bitcoin that are lost when bitcoin is already popular and more valueable but the rate of lost bitcoins can be lower now and those that lost their bitcoins are maybe really noob on using a bitcoin . if there will be another fork i dont think the fork can help recover lost bitcoins because forks dont work like that and i never heard past forks have recovered lost bitcoins but its possible to know if a btc account is dead , just check its last transaction time and if there is no activity that is probably dead .